RavePloughsharesIn revisiting these essays, Laymon responds to the voice he had nearly a decade ago, and to the echo of his own work speaking to his ghosts, and the echo of the people he wrote to in his home, which he can now more clearly hear. Laymon often talks about how he \'had to write to be a decent human being.\' How the act of not-writing is stagnation, how that stagnation leads to him slowly killing himself and those he loves. Writing is movement, and movement is needed for peoples that don’t always have a physical space that is a welcoming home. And revision is how you keep the conversation going with yourself, and your readers. Revision is how you improve your work, your home, yourself. It is how you build yourself a home with your writing, even if just in words and art, as home is not always afforded to us in physical spaces in this world ... Laymon has to keep writing—to not-write, to not-revise, is to be silent, is to quiet the echoes, is to slowly kill himself and others ... he will continue to use his love, his voice, to write to his peoples, and he will continue to revise off the echo of his own writing, off his own personal ghosts, off the ghosts of the peoples that came before him, off the written monuments they memorialized. And he can continue to revise and use his voice for his peoples, for his home, for those of us that follow him, and our responses can echo back, as we all examine what is wrong with us, as we all examine how we slowly kill ourselves and those we love in America, as we build homes for ourselves.
